The British government has lost two crucial votes in the House of Commons on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. The bill extends existing racial hatred provisions to cover the incitement of religious hatred as well. The bill was opposed by a broad coalition of civil liberties groups, as well as by a majority of the House of Lords, who amended it to outlaw only "threatening" (rather than merely "insulting" or "abusive") language and to require that incitement be intentional rather than reckless. Today, those amendments were confirmed by the House of Commons, after a massive backbench rebellion and many abstentions. And to add to the egg on the government's face, Tony Blair abstained on an amendment which was subsequently lost by a single vote.
But the real significance of this defeat isn't the bill in question, but the one to come. If Blair can't maintian his majority on religious hatred, then he has little chance of being able to maintain it on his draconian anti-terrorism legislation and its controversial offences of "encouraging" and "glorifying" terrorism. Hopefully we'll see another rebellion in a few months which will result in these clauses - and ideally, most of the bill - being consigned to the dustbin where they belong.
1 comments:
Sorry, Idiot, this bill was not defeated by a "massive backbench rebellion". The more I think about about it, the more I agree with Guardian newsblooger Philip Cowley who wrote yesterday:
Whereas the two defeats over the terrorism bill in November could not fairly be blamed on the whips office - the whips had then been warning consistently that they didn't have the level of support to ensure victory over the government's 90-day detention proposal - there is no such excuse for last night's defeats. The division lists record 26 Labour MPs voting against the government in the first vote, and 21 in the second. A government with a majority of 65 should be able to brush rebellions like that aside. November's defeats were a failure of political leadership. January's were a failure of whipping.
The embarrassment was made all the worse by the fact that the prime minister was present for the first vote, but was then allowed to leave the Commons before the second, presumably because people assumed the second vote was a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, it wasn't - being lost by a majority of just one - and the prime minister's vote would have been the difference between a draw (with the deputy speaker then siding with the government) or defeat. Add to that, the fact that George Galloway - recently much criticised for his poor voting record - voted for the government in both votes, and the embarrassment just intensifies.
Fingers are already being pointed at the chief whip, Hilary Armstrong - and if anyone takes the flak for the debacle it'll be her. It won't necessarily have been her that was responsible for any decisions about allowing MPs to have been absent from the Commons (that would have been the pairing whip, Tommy McAvoy) or the calculations of the numbers (much more likely to have been the deputy chief whip, Bob Ainsworth). But this was a collective failure by the whips office, and the buck stops at the top.
Some of this morning's coverage has described these as the second and third defeats on whipped votes suffered by the Blair government, conflating the two defeats over the terrorism bill. The reality is that these are the third and fourth defeats. And consider this: in the five years between 1992 and 1997 John Major suffered four defeats on whipped votes as a result of dissent. Despite a majority more than three times as large, the third Blair term has now seen the same number of defeats in just nine months.
I know in politics a win is a win, but let's not forget we still have a bad law that was only mitigated by razor-thin margins - ten and one out of a House of more than six hundred. And that wouldn't have happened at all if the Lords had not bucked the convention that they do not amend bills clearly signaled as manifesto commitments.
Posted by Craig Ranapia : 2/02/2006 09:40:00 AM
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